OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Gentle Introduction to Deep Learning in Medical Image Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper tries to give a gentle introduction to deep learning in medical image processing, proceeding from theoretical foundations to applications. We first discuss general reasons for the popularity of deep learning, including several major breakthroughs in computer science. Next, we start reviewing the fundamental basics of the perceptron and neural networks, along with some fundamental theory that is often omitted. Doing so allows us to understand the reasons for the rise of deep learning in many application domains. Obviously medical image processing is one of these areas which has been largely affected by this rapid progress, in particular in image detection and recognition, image segmentation, image registration, and computer-aided diagnosis. There are also recent trends in physical simulation, modelling, and reconstruction that have led to astonishing results. Yet, some of these approaches neglect prior knowledge and hence bear the risk of producing implausible results. These apparent weaknesses highlight current limitations of deep learning. However, we also briefly discuss promising approaches that might be able to resolve these problems in the future.
Technology Assisted Reviews: Finding the Last Few Relevant Documents by Asking Yes/No Questions to Reviewers
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

The goal of a technology-assisted review is to achieve high recall with low human effort. Continuous active learning algorithms have demonstrated good performance in locating the majority of relevant documents in a collection, however their performance is reaching a plateau when 80\%-90\% of them has been found. Finding the last few relevant documents typically requires exhaustively reviewing the collection. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify these last few, but significant, documents efficiently. Our method makes the hypothesis that entities carry vital information in documents, and that reviewers can answer questions about the presence or absence of an entity in the missing relevance documents. Based on this we devise a sequential Bayesian search method that selects the optimal sequence of questions to ask. The experimental results show that our proposed method can greatly improve performance requiring less reviewing effort.
HiTR: Hierarchical Topic Model Re-estimation for Measuring Topical Diversity of Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring topical diversity identifies three distributions for assessing the diversity of documents: distributions of words within documents, words within topics, and topics within documents. Topic models play a central role in this approach and, hence, their quality is crucial to the efficacy of measuring topical diversity. The quality of topic models is affected by two causes: generality and impurity of topics. General topics only include common information of a background corpus and are assigned to most of the documents. Impure topics contain words that are not related to the topic. Impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models. Impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a hierarchical re-estimation process aimed at removing generality and impurity. Our approach has three re-estimation components: (1) document re-estimation, which removes general words from the documents; (2) topic re-estimation, which re-estimates the distribution over words of each topic; and (3) topic assignment re-estimation, which re-estimates for each document its distributions over topics. For measuring topical diversity of text documents, our HiTR approach improves over the state-of-the-art measured on PubMed dataset.
Training Deep Neural Network in Limited Precision
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Energy and resource efficient training of DNNs will greatly extend the applications of deep learning. However, there are three major obstacles which mandate accurate calculation in high precision. In this paper, we tackle two of them related to the loss of gradients during parameter update and backpropagation through a softmax nonlinearity layer in low precision training. We implemented SGD with Kahan summation by employing an additional parameter to virtually extend the bit-width of the parameters for a reliable parameter update. We also proposed a simple guideline to help select the appropriate bit-width for the last FC layer followed by a softmax nonlinearity layer. It determines the lower bound of the required bit-width based on the class size of the dataset. Extensive experiments on various network architectures and benchmarks verifies the effectiveness of the proposed technique for low precision training.
Activity Recognition using Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models on Streaming Sensor Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Activity recognition from sensor data deals with various challenges, such as overlapping activities, activity labeling, and activity detection. Although each challenge in the field of recognition has great importance, the most important one refers to online activity recognition. The present study tries to use online hierarchical hidden Markov model to detect an activity on the stream of sensor data which can predict the activity in the environment with any sensor event. The activity recognition samples were labeled by the statistical features such as the duration of activity. The results of our proposed method test on two different datasets of smart homes in the real world showed that one dataset has improved 4% and reached (59%) while the results reached 64.6% for the other data by using the best methods.
Semi-Supervised Overlapping Community Finding based on Label Propagation with Pairwise Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Algorithms for detecting communities in complex networks are generally unsupervised, relying solely on the structure of the network. However, these methods can often fail to uncover meaningful groupings that reflect the underlying communities in the data, particularly when those structures are highly overlapping. One way to improve the usefulness of these algorithms is by incorporating additional background information, which can be used as a source of constraints to direct the community detection process. In this work, we explore the potential of semi-supervised strategies to improve algorithms for finding overlapping communities in networks. Specifically, we propose a new method, based on label propagation, for finding communities using a limited number of pairwise constraints. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the potential of this approach for uncovering meaningful community structures in cases where each node can potentially belong to more than one community.
Discursive Landscapes and Unsupervised Topic Modeling in IR: A Validation of Text-As-Data Approaches through a New Corpus of UN Security Council Speeches on Afghanistan
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

The recent turn towards quantitative text-as-data approaches in IR brought new ways to study the discursive landscape of world politics. Here seen as complementary to qualitative approaches, quantitative assessments have the advantage of being able to order and make comprehensible vast amounts of text. However, the validity of unsupervised methods applied to the types of text available in large quantities needs to be established before they can speak to other studies relying on text and discourse as data. In this paper, we introduce a new text corpus of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) speeches on Afghanistan between 2001 and 2017; we study this corpus through unsupervised topic modeling (LDA) with the central aim to validate the topic categories that the LDA identifies; and we discuss the added value, and complementarity, of quantitative text-as-data approaches. We set-up two tests using mixed- method approaches. Firstly, we evaluate the identified topics by assessing whether they conform with previous qualitative work on the development of the situation in Afghanistan. Secondly, we use network analysis to study the underlying social structures of what we will call 'speaker-topic relations' to see whether they correspondent to know divisions and coalitions in the UNSC. In both cases we find that the unsupervised LDA indeed provides valid and valuable outputs. In addition, the mixed-method approaches themselves reveal interesting patterns deserving future qualitative research. Amongst these are the coalition and dynamics around the 'women and human rights' topic as part of the UNSC debates on Afghanistan.
Chromatic Polynomials of Oriented Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

The oriented chromatic polynomial of a oriented graph outputs the number of oriented $k$-colourings for any input $k$. We fully classify those oriented graphs for which the oriented graph has the same chromatic polynomial as the underlying simple graph, closing an open problem posed by Sopena. We find that such oriented graphs can be both identified and constructed in polynomial time as they are exactly the family of quasi-transitive oriented co-interval graphs. We study the analytic properties of this polynomial and show that there exist oriented graphs which have chromatic polynomials have roots, including negative real roots, that cannot be realized as the root of any chromatic polynomial of a simple graph.
Tilt Rotations and the Tilt Phase Space
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, the intuitive idea of tilt is formalised into the rigorous concept of tilt rotations. This is motivated by the high relevance that pure tilt rotations have in the analysis of balancing bodies in 3D, and their applicability to the analysis of certain types of contacts. The notion of a 'tilt rotation' is first precisely defined, before multiple parameterisations thereof are presented for mathematical analysis. It is demonstrated how such rotations can be represented in the so-called tilt phase space, which as a vector space allows for a meaningful definition of commutative addition. The properties of both tilt rotations and the tilt phase space are also extensively explored, including in the areas of spherical linear interpolation, rotational velocities, rotation composition and rotation decomposition.
DefunT: A Tool for Automating Termination Proofs by Using the Community Books (Extended Abstract)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We present a tool that automates termination proofs for recursive definitions by mining existing termination theorems.
Neural Network based classification of bone metastasis by primary cacinoma
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Neural networks have been known for a long time as a tool for different types of classification, but only just in the last decade they have showed their entire power. Along with appearing of hardware that is capable to support demanding matrix operations and parallel algorithms, the neural network, as a universal function approximation framework, turns out to be the most successful classification method widely used in all fields of science. On the other side, multifractal (MF) approach is an efficient way for quantitative description of complex structures [1] such as metastatic carcinoma, which recommends this method as an accurate tool for medical diagnostics. The only part that is missing is classification method. The goal of this research is to describe and apply a feed-forward neural network as an auxiliary diagnostic method for classification of multifractal parameters in order to determine primary cancer.
CRH: A Simple Benchmark Approach to Continuous Hashing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, the distinctive advancement of handling huge data promotes the evolution of ubiquitous computing and analysis technologies. With the constantly upward system burden and computational complexity, adaptive coding has been a fascinating topic for pattern analysis, with outstanding performance. In this work, a continuous hashing method, termed continuous random hashing (CRH), is proposed to encode sequential data stream, while ignorance of previously hashing knowledge is possible. Instead, a random selection idea is adopted to adaptively approximate the differential encoding patterns of data stream, e.g., streaming media, and iteration is avoided for stepwise learning. Experimental results demonstrate our method is able to provide outstanding performance, as a benchmark approach to continuous hashing.
A Novel Domain Adaptation Framework for Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a segmentation framework that uses deep neural networks and introduce two innovations. First, we describe a biophysics-based domain adaptation method. Second, we propose an automatic method to segment white and gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid, in addition to tumorous tissue. Regarding our first innovation, we use a domain adaptation framework that combines a novel multispecies biophysical tumor growth model with a generative adversarial model to create realistic looking synthetic multimodal MR images with known segmentation. Regarding our second innovation, we propose an automatic approach to enrich available segmentation data by computing the segmentation for healthy tissues. This segmentation, which is done using diffeomorphic image registration between the BraTS training data and a set of prelabeled atlases, provides more information for training and reduces the class imbalance problem. Our overall approach is not specific to any particular neural network and can be used in conjunction with existing solutions. We demonstrate the performance improvement using a 2D U-Net for the BraTS'18 segmentation challenge. Our biophysics based domain adaptation achieves better results, as compared to the existing state-of-the-art GAN model used to create synthetic data for training.
Maximizing Clearance Rate of Reputation-aware Auctions in Mobile Crowdsensing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Auctions have been employed as an effective framework for the management and the assignment of tasks in mobile crowdsensing (MCS). In auctions terminology, the clearance rate (CR) refers to the percentage of items that are sold over the duration of the auction. This research is concerned with maximizing the CR of reputation-aware (RA) auctions in centralized, participatory MCS systems. Recent techniques in the literature had focused on several challenges including untruthful bidding and malicious information that might be sent by the participants. Less attention has been given, though, to the number of completed tasks in such systems, even though it has a tangible impact on the satisfaction of service demanders. Towards the goal of maximizing CR in MCS systems, we propose two new formulations for the bidding procedure that is a part of the task allocation strategy. Simulations were carried out to evaluate the proposed methods and their impact on the user utility, under varying number of auctions, tasks, and participants. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested methods through consistent and considerable increases (three times increase, in some cases) in the CR compared to the state-of-the-art.
Learning to Globally Edit Images with Textual Description
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We show how we can globally edit images using textual instructions: given a source image and a textual instruction for the edit, generate a new image transformed under this instruction. To tackle this novel problem, we develop three different trainable models based on RNN and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The models (bucket, filter bank, and end-to-end) differ in how much expert knowledge is encoded, with the most general version being purely end-to-end. To train these systems, we use Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect textual descriptions for around 2000 image pairs sampled from several datasets. Experimental results evaluated on our dataset validate our approaches. In addition, given that the filter bank model is a good compromise between generality and performance, we investigate it further by replacing RNN with Graph RNN, and show that Graph RNN improves performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computational photography work on global image editing that is purely based on free-form textual instructions.
Overview of CAIL2018: Legal Judgment Prediction Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we give an overview of the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) competition at Chinese AI and Law challenge (CAIL2018). This competition focuses on LJP which aims to predict the judgment results according to the given facts. Specifically, in CAIL2018 , we proposed three subtasks of LJP for the contestants, i.e., predicting relevant law articles, charges and prison terms given the fact descriptions. CAIL2018 has attracted several hundreds participants (601 teams, 1, 144 contestants from 269 organizations). In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the task definition, related works, outstanding methods and competition results in CAIL2018.
Equivalent Constraints for Two-View Geometry: Pose Solution/Pure Rotation Identification and 3D Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Two-view relative pose estimation and structure reconstruction is a classical problem in computer vision. The typical methods usually employ the singular value decomposition of the essential matrix to get multiple solutions of the relative pose, from which the right solution is picked out by reconstructing the three-dimension (3D) feature points and imposing the constraint of positive depth. This paper revisits the two-view geometry problem and discovers that the two-view imaging geometry is equivalently governed by a Pair of new Pose-Only (PPO) constraints: the same-side constraint and the intersection constraint. From the perspective of solving equation, the complete pose solutions of the essential matrix are explicitly derived and we rigorously prove that the orientation part of the pose can still be recovered in the case of pure rotation. The PPO constraints are simplified and formulated in the form of inequalities to directly identify the right pose solution with no need of 3D reconstruction and the 3D reconstruction can be analytically achieved from the identified right pose. Furthermore, the intersection inequality also enables a robust criterion for pure rotation identification. Experiment results validate the correctness of analyses and the robustness of the derived pose solution/pure rotation identification and analytical 3D reconstruction.
Linearizable Replicated State Machines with Lattice Agreement
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

This paper studies the lattice agreement problem in asynchronous systems and explores its application to building linearizable replicated state machines (RSM). First, we propose an algorithm to solve the lattice agreement problem in $O(\log f)$ asynchronous rounds, where $f$ is the number of crash failures that the system can tolerate. This is an exponential improvement over the previous best upper bound. Second, Faleiro et al have shown in [Faleiro et al. PODC, 2012] that combination of conflict-free data types and lattice agreement protocols can be applied to implement linearizable RSM. They give a Paxos style lattice agreement protocol, which can be adapted to implement linearizable RSM and guarantee that a command can be learned in at most $O(n)$ message delays, where $n$ is the number of proposers. Later on, Xiong et al in [Xiong et al. DISC, 2018] give a lattice agreement protocol which improves the $O(n)$ guarantee to be $O(f)$. However, neither protocols is practical for building a linearizable RSM. Thus, in the second part of the paper, we first give an improved protocol based on the one proposed by Xiong et al. Then, we implement a simple linearizable RSM using the our improved protocol and compare our implementation with an open source Java implementation of Paxos. Results show that better performance can be obtained by using lattice agreement based protocols to implement a linearizable RSM compared to traditional consensus based protocols.
Combining fragments of classical logic: When are interaction principles needed?
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We investigate the combination of fragments of classical logic as a way of conservatively extending a given Boolean logic by the addition of new connectives, and we precisely characterize the circumstances in which such a combination produces the corresponding fragment of classical logic over the signature containing connectives from both fragments given as input. If the thereby produced combined fragment is only incompletely characterized by the components given as input, this means that connectives from one component need to interact with connectives from the other component, giving rise to interaction principles. The main contributions strongly rely on the (well-known) description of the 2-valued clones made by Post, on the (not so well-known) axiomatization procedures for 2-valued matrices laid out by Rautenberg, and on Avron's non-deterministic matrices, which have (recently) been used to produce a significant advance on the understanding of the semantics of fibring.
Optimal Time Scheduling Scheme for Wireless Powered Ambient Backscatter Communication in IoT Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we investigate optimal scheme to manage time scheduling of different modules including spectrum sensing, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (RFH) and ambient backscatter communication (ABCom) by maximizing data transmission rate in the internet of things (IoT). We first consider using spectrum sensing with energy detection techniques to detect high power ambient RF signals, and then performing RFH and ABCom with them. Specifically, to improve the spectrum sensing efficiency, compressive sensing is used to detect the wideband RF singals. We propose a joint optimization problem of optimizing time scheduling parameter and power allocation ratio, where power allocation ratio appears because REH and ABCom work at the same time. In addition, a method to find the threshold of spectrum sensing for backscatter communication by analyzing the outage probability of backscatter communication is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that the optimal schemes with spectrum sensing are achieved with larger transmission rates. Compressive sensing based method is confirmed to be more efficient, and that the superiorities become more obvious with the increasing of the network operation time. Moreover, the optimal scheduling parameters and power allocation ratios are obtained. Also, simulations illustrate that the threshold of spectrum sensing for backscatter communication is obtained by analyzing the outage probability of backscatter communication.
DPASF: A Flink Library for Streaming Data preprocessing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Data preprocessing techniques are devoted to correct or alleviate errors in data. Discretization and feature selection are two of the most extended data preprocessing techniques. Although we can find many proposals for static Big Data preprocessing, there is little research devoted to the continuous Big Data problem. Apache Flink is a recent and novel Big Data framework, following the MapReduce paradigm, focused on distributed stream and batch data processing. In this paper we propose a data stream library for Big Data preprocessing, named DPASF, under Apache Flink. We have implemented six of the most popular data preprocessing algorithms, three for discretization and the rest for feature selection. The algorithms have been tested using two Big Data datasets. Experimental results show that preprocessing can not only reduce the size of the data, but to maintain or even improve the original accuracy in a short time. DPASF contains useful algorithms when dealing with Big Data data streams. The preprocessing algorithms included in the library are able to tackle Big Datasets efficiently and to correct imperfections in the data.